Moonlight

The movie “Moonlight” opens with equilibrium whereby it features the life of a young teenage boy called Chiron whose mother was a drug-addict. The young man’s childhood was hard having to depend on strangers for accommodation. The movie also features teaching a young man how to swim, cooking a meal, and enjoying the sand on the beach. Chiron who was poor and black was initiated into gaysim by his peers.  The movie also talks about mass incarceration, school violence, and drug abuse.  The sections comprise of Chiron in three chapters. The movie is played as a wide-eyed boy by Alex Hibbert, as a menacing adolescent by Ashton Sanders and also as a grown man by Trevante Rhodes. The meaning and the nature of manhood is seen in Mr. Jenkins’s chief concerns.  How cruel? How brave? How tender? The initiation of Chiron into such questions is through confusion and fear.

We encounter Chiron on the run, escaping from other kids who want to beat him up. He is smaller than most of them. Chiron’s efforts to work out the relationship between his confused desires and the schoolyard homophobia of his peers is one of the trails along which his periodic record proceeds. His relationship with his mother (Paula) is also equally complex who is addicted to drugs. The drug trade is controlled by Juan who becomes a proxy father to Chiron.  

At the beach, Juan teaches Chiron how to swim and tells him to work hard to build his life and be independent rather than depend on anyone. Chiron’s life is gradually shaped as he sees the miserable life lived by his drug addictive mother. 

The film reflects the young urban U.S men as bullies. They are very influential to their fellow men and act harshly to whoever rejects their company and mode of conduct. Chiron is forced to show off his nakedness as his fellows. The drug dealer as a default role model for the fatherless Chiron is an essential of hip-hop legend and a pop sociology. Nonetheless, Juan arouses platitudes of African-American masculinity so as to shatter them. The film resides on the beauty, dignity and dreadful defenselessness of the black bodies on the physical matter of the black people. Here, the colours are luminous and rich, the beauty is enhanced by the slowness of the scene, the sensuality of the camera motion, and the lovely stillness is integral to the movies argument. 

In terms of the tone and the structure, the movie sets itself against the naturalism that has become a defaulting setting for the movies about a social depression.  Paula and Chiron do suffer, but they are enlightened from the typical film curvature of recovery and desolation. The vital original focus on the inner life of Chiron has been retained in the narrative film making. The film contains various reversals and twists. The friendship of Chiron and Kevin who is a schoolmate evolves through a dance betrayal which is more described than witnessed. A significant death of Juan occurs in the interval between two of the chapters and is only mentioned in passing. Violence and crime and incarceration are life issues and facts. The movie is open-ended and it resists the easy categorization or summarization. Despite everything, Chiron is finally free from torture. He has grown to understand himself and the world despite bullying from his peers.